How Photographs Can Boost the Memoir Genre

There are plenty of perfectly good reasons why memoir has become the bullied little sister in the genre family—that self-indulgent slacker, that pity-party thrower, that kid who keeps crying wolf (or worse), that pants-on-fire liar—but I’m still guarding her bath water, thank you. I’m looking out for her, whispering tactics in her ear. Today, for example, I’ve got a word for her. That word is:

Photographs.

Not as a cure-all, not as a one-size-fits-all, but as a let’s-have-a-think-about-this. Somebody doubting the “facts” of the tale? Why not a little un-Photoshopped proof? Somebody wishing the narrative would grow a tad larger than itself? Why not the metaphors that are born of a camera’s snap? Somebody thinking there are no new stories to tell? Photographs, I say. There are precedents.

We have, for example, Dorothy Allison, who writes in her memoir: “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make.”

Allison is, she says, “a storyteller.” Someone who will:

… work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truths. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended.

The story becomes the thing needed. (3)

Since Allison’s story has been sold to us as memoir, we want to believe that it is true, that it is sure. She may have cautioned us—“a few details” changed—but we are consoled by that rage (it’s absolute) and by the photographs (yes!: black and white, soft-edged) that live like substrate among Allison’s words. We have, thanks to rescued albums and ink dots, something we hold to as truth.

So that Allison will write:

The women of my family? We are the ones in all those photographs taken at mining disasters, floods, fires. We are the ones in the background with our mouths open, in print dresses or drawstring pants and collarless smocks, ugly and old and exhausted. Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. (33)

… and there they are, the women, staring back at us from the page. Wide feet. Wide hands. Their thoughts too big for the camera, maybe, but their expressions wholly telling. “Two or Three Things“ speaks of a life radically investigated and partially known. It is poetry, documentary, and persistent caution, which makes for stunning memoir. Language may be fallible, Allison suggests, and memory inexpert, but here they are, these photographs, as signposts, symbols, sighs.

When Calvin Trillin writes, in “Messages from My Father,” that his dad “did not make a strong first impression,” we can see that for ourselves, thanks to the wrinkled attire of the slouching man whose eyes rumble back at us over the captions. When David Carr writes, in “The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story of His Life. His Own,” that “the cops had run out of adjectives”—“My speech was ‘regional’ and ‘obscene,’ I was ‘married’ and ‘single,’ my eyes were ‘blue’ and ‘brown,’ I was ‘stocky’ and ‘obese,’ I lived on ‘Garfield,’ no ‘Oliver,’ no, I was homeless” (148)—the accompanying photographs suggest a fluctuating, tormented man. Likewise the photographs provided of Geoffrey Wolff’s father and Alexandra Fuller’s mother in “Duke of Deception“ and “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” respectively. They shuffle the words to the side for just a moment, because we need time to see.

But what is Patti Smith up to, in her showstopping “Just Kids,” a book whose primary subjects—Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe—are poets, performers, and photographers? Is it possible that Smith offers her photographs not just as evidence of a time and a friendship, but also as texture and performance—as extensions of the artists themselves? That she uses them to buttress the words Smith remembers Mapplethorpe saying: “Patti, nobody sees as we do.” (80) Smith’s photographs do more than suggest, congeal, and authenticate. They stand in for that which cannot be said.

And what about all the ways that photographs can operate, in memoir, as metaphor and counterweight, as tease and opposition, as the other half of a parenthesis? In “Running in the Family,“ for example, the photographs don’t necessarily, or primarily, prove Michael Ondaatje’s unbounded tales of growing up in Sri Lanka. Instead they deepen the ambiguities, foreshadow the dualities, put a bit more acknowledged tremble into the delicate business of remembering. Late in the book, for example, we find ourselves looking down upon the image of Ondaatje’s parents, people about whom Ondaatje has already shared ample myths and rumors.

The photograph appears under the section heading “What We Think of Married Life.” Ondaatje’s parents are elegantly dressed. But they are also aping for the camera—the father crossing his eyes, the mother thrusting her jaw—and it’s a little strange; it’s uncomfortable. We expect a caption or two, an instant explanation, but in the pages immediately following, we find not the prank but this whispered assertion: “The roads weave and whorl away—bright yellow under the grey sky. The sun, invisible, struggles up somewhere. This is the colour of landscape, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents’ marriage.” (167)

By juxtaposing the raucous image with the infused topography, the visual noise and the linguistic stillness, Ondaatje reaffirms the complexity of parents. He prepares us for this sentence: “They were a world to themselves, genial with everyone but sharing a code of humour.” (170) His photography assures reader—and writer—that Ondaatje’s family cannot be reduced.

Perhaps few memoirists are as overtly drawn to the photograph as both evidence and riddle as Orhan Pamuk in “Istanbul: Memories and the City.” This tale of a boy growing up/grown up launches with this opening salvo: “From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.” (3)

A memoir about twins, then, about doubles and hallucinatory life, about history that is both personal and cultural, domestic and geographic. Some of the photographs that accompany this text are drawn from Pamuk’s family archives. But the vast majority were taken by the photographer Ara Guler. Pamuk explains:

… during my time searching in his home-studio-archive-museum … I came across many treasured but long-forgotten images… as beguilingly familiar to my adult eye as they were strange. When I happened on the view of the snow-covered Galata Bridge on 316 it was as if my own memory had been projected onto a screen; there were other moments like that, when I would be seized by a frenzy to capture and preserve this dreamscape or to write about it. (374)

Within the frame of Pamuk’s memoir, Guler’s photographs do not operate as proof of a specific life lived. Instead they suggest how memory works, how history is held and not held, how memoir, like photography, is about perspective, cropping, research, imagination.

It’s about the gaps—and how we fill them. With ink, with dots, with ambiguity and grammar, and sometimes—sometimes—with photographs. That’s my word, on this fine day, to the memoir in my family.